Historic Jacksonville Theatre Palaces, Drive-ins and Movie Houses

By Dorothy K. Fletcher

Jacksonville's theatre and performance history is rich with flair and drama. The theatres, drive-ins and movie houses that brought entertainment to its citizens have their own exciting stories. Some have passed into memory. The Dixie Theatre, originally part of Dixieland Park, began to fade in 1909. The Palace Theatre, home to vaudeville acts, was torn down in the '50s. The Alhambra has been everyone's favorite dinner theatre since 1967's debut of Come Blow Your Horn. Local author Dorothy K. Fletcher revives the history of Jacksonville's theatres. Lights, camera, action!

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781625852946

Dorothy K. Fletcher

After thirty-five years of teaching English in Jacksonville, Florida, Dorothy K. Fletcher began enjoying life as a writer. For almost four years, she wrote "By the Wayside," a nostalgia column for the Florida Times-Union. This culminated in her book Remembering Jacksonville: By the Wayside. She continues to freelance even as she travels with her husband, Hardy, plays with her grandchildren and tutors at her old elementary school.

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Author

INTRODUCTION

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

—William Shakespeare, As You Like It, act 2, scene 7

There were many reasons why I was drawn to writing a book about Jacksonville theatres. To begin with, my father had a passion for movies. Whether we were in a theatre, a car at the drive-in or just sitting on the sofa at home watching the Sunday movie matinee on television, his love for movies was infectious. His childhood favorites—Tarzan, Captain Blood, Beau Geste—became my favorites, and I came to appreciate all the war movies he took us to watch like The Guns of Navarone, The Young Lions and The Caine Mutiny.

My mother was into live productions and musical performances, and she helped me come to appreciate plays and concerts. On many an afternoon, we enjoyed Peter and the Wolf, the Nutcracker Suite or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She opened the world of music and dance and drama to me.

As a teenager, I discovered I had independence, and my best friend, Marguerite, and I hopped a bus to get to the Center Theatre at least four times to be swept away by the epic movie Lawrence of Arabia. Oh, how my father would tease me about my fanatic devotion for Peter O’Toole! Still, he didn’t discourage my going since he knew very well the lure of motion pictures, especially grand ones.

I discovered the fun of drive-ins when I was a little bit older—meeting friends, boyfriends, hiding in the trunk. What more can I say?

When I became a parent, the cycle began again. My children learned to love movies and the wonderful places that showed them. We went to plays and concerts and drive-ins and movie houses, and my daughter even became a concessionaire at the long-gone Baymeadows Eight Movie Theatre. Every night, she came home smelling of popcorn, and that smell instantly took me back to earlier days when we all went out to the lobby, to get ourselves a treat.

It was only natural that I would gravitate toward this project.

When I started, I knew that I would have to sort through a great deal of information, but I wasn’t expecting the scope of that information to become so massive. After a while, I began to experience something akin to what I have imagined herding cattle might be like. The bulk of the information just loped along at a steady pace when all of a sudden I’d realize that three cows (or topics) had wandered off in different contrary directions. It took hours for me to get back to the herd (or the manuscript). Then, there’d be a stampede that would take me totally by surprise and would upset all my original plans so that I had to start over.

There were the lonely moments when I wondered how I got into this cattle drive in the first place and the ecstatic moments when I discovered wonderful places and things I would never have experienced had I not signed up for the trip. It has been quite the drive for me.

As with all books, I needed to find a method of organization, and four major sections slowly emerged, although they do tend to overlap. Chapter 1 deals with theatres around the first quarter of the twentieth century: the vaudeville, nickelodeons, early moving pictures and formal theatrical and concert venues. I felt it necessary to honor the very old theatres that have been dust longer than most of us have been alive. These theatres set the groundwork for all the theatres that followed. Chapter 2 covers live performance theatres, many of which are still operating and entertaining us today. Chapter 3 covers many of the movie theatres that thrived in the midto late twentieth century, and finally, Chapter 4 pays homage to the drive-in movie phenomenon.

Please be advised that I will not be including multiplex theatres, nor have I covered every theatre that ever existed in Jacksonville. Sadly, I have left out a number of theatres for which I could find very little information. Sometimes theatres began with one name and closed with another, and some were forbidden places that banned young people for obvious reasons. I took what information I could find, and hopefully, the most memorable theatres are represented.

There is a piece of housekeeping I need to address—the spelling of the word theatre. Throughout this book, I will use the British spelling of the word; first, because Robert Arleigh White, retired executive director for Theatre Jacksonville, former Cultural Council director and present-day actor, told me so. Theatre is how the word should always be spelled!

There is also another reason. The theatres represented in this book used the British spelling in advertizing and on their marquees. The print media used that spelling in almost every article or review I researched. Therefore, I will use the British spelling in this book since it wasn’t until more recent times that the American spelling of the word crept into usage and into being the preferred spelling in the dictionary.

With all of that being said, I hope I have covered all your favorite theatres and that my chapters will conjure many happy memories. All that’s left to do now is to sit back in a nice comfy chair and enjoy once again the magic of Jacksonville’s most memorable theatres.

1

EARLY JACKSONVILLE THEATRES

LONG-GONE THEATRES

One can only imagine what it was like in Jacksonville in 1900. It was certain to have had a far different landscape and feel about it. Horses were still used in the transport of goods and people, trolleys rumbled down tracks and automobiles were few and far between. Air conditioning was still in the future, but the electric fan had thankfully been invented. And the citizens of Jacksonville had a different sophistication level when it came to entertainment. Minstrel shows, vaudevillian acts, recitations and magic acts were all the rage back in those earlier times.

As I began my research of Jacksonville theatres, I found two outstanding articles, both written by Dick Bussard, city editor of the Jacksonville Journal. The first article is called When the Nickelodeon Was in Flower, which ran on May 15, 1975. Bussard not only provided one of the best chronologies of the film industry but also interviewed two Jacksonville projectionists from the earliest years of motion pictures in our city.

According to Bussard, Thomas Edison invented the kinetoscope in 1894. In 1895, the first motion picture was shown to an audience in Paris. In 1903, The Great Train Robbery—the first full-length motion picture—premiered, and in 1907, nickelodeons were the only movies in Jacksonville. The article noted: Most Nickelodeons were small storefronts and according to Cawthon [one of the projectionists interviewed], consisted of a projector, a screen and a few chairs. Some provided a piano accompanist and all charged a nickel, thus the name. They also were noted for their gaudy advertising posters outside.

The article went on to say that regular theatres of the first quarter of the century were usually vaudeville houses with proscenium arch stages. As motion pictures developed, these theatres would use movies to fill in between acts. One such theatre was the Phoenix Park Theatre at 411 West Bay Street. Miss Mabel Paige and her big stock company opened here, and the films used between performances were Master and Man and The Shadow.

By 1910, according to the article, Jacksonville theatres really began to blossom. There was the Orpheum Theatre (which, when it closed, became the building housing the Young Men’s Shop). There was also the Majestic Theatre at 201 West Bay, the Pastime Theatre at 215 West Bay Street and the Lyric Theatre at 113 Main Street. The Amusu Theatre on Forsyth Street near Main was a big vaudeville venue that would eventually become the Grand Theatre. The Duval Theatre would eventually become the Temple Theatre.

Bussard pointed out that on the day the Lusitania sank, May 7, 1915, motion pictures and vaudeville were flourishing in Jacksonville even though many of the nickelodeons had passed on. Theda Bara was starring at the Republic Theatre in The Vampire, and the Cycling Brunettes were performing a series of difficult tricks at the Orpheum Theatre. The Grand Theatre was showing Dopey Chaplin, starring, of all people, Charlie Chaplin.

By the time we were in the middle of World War II, things had evolved. The article said, The Temple was still a vaudeville theatre, but it no longer was Jacksonville’s coolest and best. Often there were more performers on stage than there were customers in the audience. And you knew that vaudeville wasn’t dying, it was already dead.

According to the article, there was only one theatre from those early days in Jacksonville that was still operating as a theatre—the Arcade Theatre, opened in 1914. This venue would become the Center Theatre in the ’60s.

Bussard’s article also contained interviews with two projectionists: Elvin Pratt and Bender A. (Dock) Cawthon. Pratt was sixteen when he became a projectionist at the 20th Century Theatre on Bridge Street (now called Broad Street), and he retired after fifty-seven years at a variety of theatres—the last one being the Edgewood Theatre. At the time of the article’s publication, Dock Cawthon was still working at the Florida Theatre in its seventy-seat screening room. He had begun his career in 1922.

One interesting tidbit about the job of early projectionists was revealed in the Journal article: Cawthon said that in the early days movie film was fed through the projector and spilled into a basket after which it was rolled back onto the reel. But because of the highly flammable nature of film—fires were common in those days—the reels were eventually enclosed in metal boxes as a safety measure.

Longtime projectionist at the Center Theatre Jake Rekoth. Courtesy of Ellen Ruffner Pierce.

As often happens when I do research, I got excited about finding a picture to go with my text. Ellen Ruffner Pierce, whose father had been manager at a number of downtown theatres, provided me with a great image of a projectionist who had worked with her father, and I couldn’t wait to use it. I thought it was a picture of Dock Cawthon; however, I was wrong, and I am so glad I double checked. I contacted the Florida Theatre, and Bob Christopher, who had been a projectionist at the Florida Theatre for many years, identified the image as that of Jake Rekoth. Rekoth had been the secretary-treasurer of the IATSE Projectionist Union, Local 511. In any case, the picture shows what the world of a projectionist was like.

Dick Bussard’s second article was entitled City’s ‘Theatre Row’ Is No More. It ran on September 27, 1971, and in it, he extolled the wonder of Jacksonville’s little piece of theatre magic and bemoaned the loss of two theatre icons: the Empress and the Imperial Theatres. He said, Forsyth Street was truly ‘theatre row.’ At night the theatre lights lit up the sky like a little Broadway, at least for a few blocks.

He went on to say, There was a time not long ago when you passed five other theatres if you walked from the Center to the Florida. And there were several more within a block or two in other directions.

He explained that the Empress was built right after the 1901 fire and the Imperial came along in 1907. The Rialto was at Main and Forsyth Streets. On the other side of the Imperial was the Palace, a place where Bussard once stood in line to see Eddie Arnold in person. Then, there was the Center (which had once been the Arcade), and across the street was the Roxy. There was a comparatively new theatre also on Forsyth called the St. Johns, which showed The Pride of the Yankees as one of its first films.

A block away on Bay Street stood the Casino, which eventually became a male-only type theatre that showed burlesque movies. A short distance from Forsyth on Main Street was the Temple Theatre, where vaudeville had its last gasp in Jacksonville, and north from there on Main Street was the Capitol Theatre.

When this article was written, only the Florida and the Center Theatres remained of Jacksonville’s theatre row. The once thriving theatre district had only these two left.

Even after reading both